Now, it is true that Gibran would sometimes refuse to be confused with his heroes, as he said, for instance, in a letter to Miss May Ziadeh concerning the personage The Madman.1 Still, I hold the theory that the motives behind a work have to be fetched “in” the individual contributor, in that la raison d’être of the product portrays the personality of the producer.

In this chapter, which I might have entitled “An Introduction to Gibran,” I will depict the essential themes of Gibran’s philosophy through his printed literature, in as much that I will attempt to outline the influences he bore, and the impact he left on his readers.

1. The Meaning of Gibran’s Publications

Gibran has conveyed his thoughts through many literary forms of expression. He wrote many books ranging from poems, aphorisms, short plays, parables, to essays, and novels.

The very first appearance of Gibran as a writer is that of rebellious youth disenchanted with anything called “organization.” Spirits Rebellious was composed in Arabic while studying in Paris in 1903. The book argues that the institutionalized laws of the church, as well as man-made social laws are decayed, for none of them enaid the individual to develop a self-identity. Rather, like Kierkegaard would say, they are “universal,” and therefore, they appeal to the common mass, and mold patterned or stereotyped personalities. The book especially denounces the Maronite clergy’s conduct toward the poor peasants as “simoniac,” and declares human laws as unethical oppressions exercised in the name of moral justice. This work is meaningful in many respects. (1) It reveals the political and religious situations of Lebanon at the time of its publication, in that it clearly underlines that the spirit of feudalism under the Turks was detrimental to the poor for it introduced the class struggle. (2) It represents Gibran’s moral philosophy.2 Though the tone of it sounds a bit rebellious, Gibran’s ethic, however, should not be identified with nowadays revolutionary radicals who abhore unconditionally whatever is called “establishment,” meaning a complete rejection of rules and order in society. On the contrary, like Rousseau, Gibran is a “reformer” of the social woes caused by injustice, ineffective traditions, and the unnatural laws that hurt the innate laws of human nature. His reform asks that kindness, forgiveness and love be the guidelines of social intercourse between citizen and government. (3) Finally, the novel anticipates Gibran’s later writings. In the theory-building of many philosophers, historians detect an evolution of ideas that involve contradictions and ambiguities, but, Gibran really never relinquished his very first ideas and never raised paradoxes in his system.

Soon after its publication, Spirits Rebellious was burned in the mid of Beirut. For punishment Gibran was excommunicated from the Catholic Maronite Church and was exiled by the Turkish officials from Lebanon. In a letter he wrote to his first cousin, Nakhli Gibran, he expressed his melancholy for what his countrymen did to him.

… I am not sure whether the Arabic-speaking world would remain as friendly to me as it has been in the past three years. I say this because the apparition of enmity has already appeared. The people in Syria are calling me heretic, and the intelligentsia in Egypt vilifies me, saying, “He is the enemy of just laws, of family ties, and of old traditions.” Those writers are telling the truth, because I do not love man-made laws and I abhor the traditions that our ancestors left us. This hatred is the fruit of my love for the sacred and spiritual kindness which should be the source of every law upon the earth, for kindness is the shadow of God in man … Will my teaching ever be received by the Arab world, or will it die away and disappear like a shadow?3

However, when in 1908, the Young Turks, headed by Niyazi, overthrew the Sultan Abdul-Hamid II, the new government pardoned all the exiles including Gibran who was then in Paris studying painting with Auguste Rodin.4

His next novel is The Broken Wings (1912). Personally he writes: “This book is the best one I have ever written.”5 Best, indeed it is, yet with some reservations for The Prophet was not yet. In my opinion, the philosophy outlined in this book is in continuation with the philosophy of marriage stressed in Spirits Rebellious. Nonetheless, Gibran seems less preoccupied with polemic than trying to describe to us the human predicament of love, which constitutes the central topic of the whole novel. His definition of love hither is neither Platonic nor Freudian, but between romantic and spiritual.6 Furthermore, he insists, after the manner of Blaise Pascal, that love is not the work of reason but of the heart; not the carnal or bodily sensation heart, but of a heart that still has a logic. La logique du coeur is the correct expression. What the emotions know logically, the logic of abstract reason cannot reason about unless it falls prey to one of Freud’s defense mechanisms: rationalization.

The story that Gibran narrates is autobiographical7; it is about his first romance with Miss Hala Daher, whom he met while studying in Lebanon. By the way, his matrimony to Miss Daher was impeded not by the girl’s father, but rather by the town bishop who had imposed against the wills of the girl and her father, the decision of a marriage with his nephew. The nephew was an irresponsible man and the uncle bishop was most avid to inherit the wealth of the Dahers. By the way, a movie has been made about The Broken Wings.

A Tear and a Smile (1914), argues through poems and prose poems that human existence oscillates between two metaphysical predicaments, viz., joy and suffering. These are metaphysical, because they express human dimensions, and impregnate the core of the being of man. Somehow, the philosophy that he expounds in this book is neither Schopenhauerism nor Leibnizian. The former thought that everything is evil and that our world is the worst one that God could have ever created. To the other extreme, Leibniz taught an exaggerated optimism, saying that if opportunity was presented, God could not create a better world than this one.